Since Amazon have it, I feel I can safely post this image of the jacket!

Jason Booher, the brain behind the US TGAW jackets, has excelled himself in designing Angelmaker for Knopf. It’s just gorgeous. There are some tweaks to come to make it even cooler and cleverer (and, yes, more achingly purchasable) but basically what you see here is the heart of it. Amazon lists the book as due March 20th 2012, which is, as you might say, within the margin of error. I had it in my diary as Feb/March, and we all know that Amazon dates can turn out to be a little more definite than the available information actually merits, but hey. It’s about then. You’ll know when I do. (Or possibly somewhat before – my fave independent initiative, Indiebound, lists March 20th as well. Oh ho! Could it be? I must find out.)

I saw this design earlier this year, in the midst of one of what now seems like a million passes at the text of the book to get it right, and it lifted me out of a kind of gloomy certainty that the damn thing would never see the light of day into an altogether more positive determination to get the job done. “There’s a jacket design! It’s real, I tell you, REAL! BWAHAHAHAHAA!”

Mrs Harkaway locked me in the garden until I stopped cackling. Since the garden was at the time a concrete and black plastic sheet over a foot-deep layer of manure, this was a remarkably effective tactic, but she is not to do it again.

(I got my revenge by changing her alarm clock noise to this and not telling her. Sandra Boynton, in case I have not mentioned this, is made entirely from awesome.)

Back to the Angelmaker jacket - did I mention that I love it? – it came in two flavours, matt and gloss. The matt one was very grown up and looked a bit more literary. It was also easier to spot from some angles. The shiny one, of course, was a blaze of imprudent glory, and everyone fell in love with its slutty come-open-me-and-read-me-til-you-can’t-take-any-more attitude. I tried to be serious and professional about the whole thing. I took the two jackets and shoved them side by side on the mantel, which was hopeless because it just emphasised that they were both gorgeous in different ways. I asked people in cafés, which is my favourite scientific method for learning nothing of any quantifiable worth. In the end, I just told Edward Kastenmeier that I loved them both but I loved this bit of this one and that bit of that one and could we combine the two? Edward made what I have come to think of as the ‘editor noise’. It is the noise editors make when authors act like five-year-olds. It is a brief, silent gap in the audible landscape during which they count to ten or pray or stab themselves in the leg with a fork.

“We can make it pop,” Edward said.

“It totally pops now,” I said. “I just think it could pop more in these cool ways I have recently demanded from you because I know that you love when I ask for something more than the amazingness you have already given me.”

“I do love that,” Edward said. “I will speak to the design team about how to make it pop more. They actually have some insane poppy things they want to do anyway. We will implement your helpful and inexpensive suggestions at the same time, although probably not the last one about the neon lights and the built-in corkscrew, because of our pesky US drinking age laws.”

“Right you are,” I said.

This is how all our editor-author conversations go. Honestly.

So I don’t know if this is exactly how the book will look. But it’s close.

The UK jacket is still in the works, although the images I’ve seen are also stunning. By way of compensation, the UK may get the book fractionally earlier – late February, I think – which means UK readers will have longer to think about its deeper meaning (which I will discuss in detail with anyone who wants to tell me what it is) before the Mayan Apocalypse.

That sound you hear? That is me dancing the many-footed Harkaway Dance of Jackety Goodness. Yea, unto the second generation, because my daughter can almost stand up by herself now, so we are dancing it together, Mrs H being at work and therefore unable to join in and/or stop us.

Laterz, d00dz.

Iraq was not a threat, and the invasion in 2003 was a distraction from the pursuit of Al Qaeda.

That’s the verdict of Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 from 2002-2007. It’s old news now that Tony Blair took us into war on a second front on grounds which were shaky at best. All the same, this bald statement from the former Director General of MI5 should be headline news, not for what it tells us about Tony Blair’s government or the ridiculous contortions of law and intelligence required to get us to war, but for the rugs it pulls from beneath some very large feet.

Back in pre-history, a journalist named Andrew Gilligan asserted that the government had ‘sexed up’ the dossier of published intelligence about Iraq. The government expressed its horror at the very notion, and Gilligan and the BBC were hauled across hot coals. The Hutton Inquiry found that the dossier had not been ‘sexed up’. Gilligan, the chairman, and the director general of the BBC all lost their jobs. The government used the incident as a stick with which to beat the corporation for years. The attempt to cut the BBC’s disobedient news arm down to a more manageable and biddable form continues to this day. (In the past, one prime minister was able to require that the BBC reorder the sequence of footage in the reporting of a riot to make it seem that rioters attacked police, rather than the other way around. Downing Street must long for the good old days.)

But the point isn’t the endless, tedious whinging of affronted politicians at a news organisation which is, in general, pretty solid.

The point is how we conduct inquiries.

Hutton found that the dossier had not been politically influenced. Butler found, in contrast, that more weight had been placed on the intelligence than it could bear. And here is Eliza Manningham-Buller saying:

“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK.

The service advised that [an invasion] was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaeda. I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan. Iraq was a distraction.”

And you have Major General Michael Laurie, who was instrumental in drawing up the September dossier, who wrote to the Chilcot inquiry to say that the dossier had been compiled to make the case for war. Sir John Scarlett, in charge of the September dossier, wrote to Downing Street that there was an advantage in “obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional.”

If you accept these statements, the question is not whether the intelligence was manipulated for political ends, but how this manipulation was done and at what point. What Eliza Manningham-Buller says appears sets the whole issue on its head: the dossier was not ‘sexed up’; if I understand correctly, it must have been edited or drafted so that what the intelligence services actually believed – that Iraq was not a threat – was hard to find in its pages, leaving only alarming discussions of Iraq’s supposed (and as it turned out non-existent) WMD capacity.

And yet we’re left to piece all this together from scraps. Despite Hutton, Butler, and Chilcot, and a smattering of other reviews, the mechanism of deception has not been exposed. The persons involved in turning black into white – terrifying the British public and parliament into a war which was (whatever you think about the pros and cons of humanitarian military intervention) unnecessary in terms of immediate self-protection and which may have made our security situation worse, and which has proved a massively costly adventure in terms of human life and hard cash – have not been called to account. Ministers and officials have been politely quizzed, and their good faith has been assumed. They have been invited to appear before kindly panels, not subjected to serious questioning on what is arguably the most serious question of our political era.

Our inquiries are toothless and ineffectual, and for as long as that remains the case our democracy is significantly weakened.

Living with my Nexus S

Before I begin: I am tired, lying on a bed apparently constructed by the Fungiform Hammock Company of Lampwick, a little bit squiffy after some medicinal Australian plonk, and I have just spent four hours in a car, mostly in traffic, with a ten month old who longs to be a marathon-running opera singer. So it is just possible that I’m about to say something silly.

What Has Gone Before

The Nexus S and I got off to a bad start. The phone was wayward and oddly uncooperative. However, we quickly found a sort of working relationship and while I still think that it’s basically an iPhone clone whose principal virtues derive from it not actually being an iPhone (but which suffers in consequence of the same thing), we’ve come to a sort of professional detente.

However

However, while waiting fifty one minutes for the traffic lights at Flangetickle Cross to change from red to orange, all the while being treated to a sort of a capella rendition of a Hendrix solo by the mosher in the travel seat, I began to contemplate the smooth contours of the Nexus S with a more searching eye. The black gloss, almost-fetish finish seemed to slither around between the seats. I have begun to understand the Nexus S. It accessorises with cheap bondage gear – not the stuff your actual bondage folk wear. The fancy dress version.

It looks like an inexpensive sex toy.

I don’t mean that it actually is, although no doubt you could achieve some measure of… no. Never mind that. The point is that it’s a sort of garish, 1992 Catwoman object. It wants you to know it’s watching. It has a cheap plastic cover which pops off if you so much as stroke it. It’s basically a phone in a pole-dancer’s outfit (which is not to denigrate pole-dancers, because frankly I’d have to be a lot fitter before I’d sneer at someone who can spin around a firepole upside down, just to say that as I understand the situation their wardrobe choices are not generally sophisticated or, er, long-lasting.)

Compare it with the HTC Desire.

A friend of mine showed me her HTC Desire last week. The damn thing is wearing velvet, for God’s sake. It’s a classy bit of kit. In fact, alongside the Nexus S, it looks like Lauren Bacall from To Have and Have Not sharing a double seat with one of the non-existent SoCal nudist coeds who keep showing up in my Google+ “has put you in their circles” notifications. That’s a phone you could take home to meet your mum. The Google version is the Fail Fast, Fail Better ethos in physical form. It knows it’s going to be recycled shortly, so why dress up nicely?

But see what’s happened there?

The question isn’t whether Android phones inspire desire. The question is which Android phone is better. Score one to Google (for changing the terms of the debate, not for making a nice phone, because the HTC is waaaay nicer.)

Although, you know what I really want?

A phone which doesn’t owe its secret allegiance to either Apple or Google. Or Microsoft, or anyone except me. I want to own my technology. I want the phone Eben Moglen would build.